A film by Guillermo G. Peydró

Shot at Gijón (Spain)

Year 2015

HD

61'

CITY OF WORK (La Ciudad del Trabajo)

Gijon’s Labor University is the maximum example of monumental architecture during the Franco autarchy in Spain (1939-1959). A boarding school for a thousand children, this socio-educational laboratory enacted the aspired future shape of the country's imposed "New Order". Using audio fragments of films from the two first decades of dictatorship, this film explores the relation between architecture and ideology, and it essays complementary ways to reveal the implications of this building-city, its ambiguous position between utopia and dystopia and its unique architecture, straddling the inventions of Piero della Francesca and Piranesi.